[#image: /photos/59095373019dfc3494e9e357]_Janet Frame—who is probably best known in the United States for her autobiography “An Angel at My Table,” though she also wrote a dozen novels and several story collections—died in 2004, at the age of 79. She published four short stories in the magazine between 1962 and 1970, but then nothing more until 2008, when we ran the first of three posthumous stories by her—this week’s fiction, “Gavin Highly,” being the third. Why was there such a long gap, and why are these unpublished pieces suddenly coming to light?_The fact is that when she was at her peak, she was so prolific that she had a publishing backlog, and a lot of work got left behind. Once she had moved on, in theme and genre, she lost interest in the older manuscripts. But she carefully preserved the work, arranged for it to be lodged in archives, and she always had a literary executor named and primed to deal with it. She frequently mentioned that she had a generous store of unpublished work. She did draw up several tables of contents toward a collection of the new stories. We don’t know for sure why she never got around to publishing that volume, but I think there were multiple reasons. She didn’t relish her fame, and once she had enough money to live on from the reprints and translations of the twenty or so books she did publish, she seemed to have decided not to expose herself to any more of the trials of fresh publication, even though she never stopped writing. Posthumous publishing is common enough in the history of literature, although the default position of the critics seems to be that posthumous work is by definition going to be inferior to the lifetime oeuvre. But before her death Frame took pains to dispose of a lot of unfinished work that wasn’t up to her standards. I’m conflicted about that because it would have been fascinating to see what didn’t make the grade. But I respect Frame’s artistic agency and I always try to release only the work that is worthy of her reputation.

The delay after her death reflects the priorities of her literary estate as well the size of our workload. I promised Frame on her deathbed that I would get a volume of her poetry published as soon as possible. So first we put together one new collection of poetry—“The Goose Bath” (soon to be available in the U.S. from Bloodaxe Books in the selected edition “Storms Will Tell”); and next we released the novel “Towards Another Summer” (published in America last year by Counterpoint). Only then did we start working through her short stories. We’re also editing a collection of her non-fiction writings and interviews.

_How did you come to be Frame’s literary executor?_My mother was her sister. They were very close and Janet often stayed with us or lived nearby. She used to babysit me when I was an infant. We had that special aunt/niece bond that some girls get if they’re lucky. And later on we became friends, confidantes, companions even. I cared for her at home when she was dying. She named me as an executor of her will and appointed me as a founding trustee of the charitable trust that owns her copyright. I’m employed by that trust now. But it’s not the nepotism that got me the job; I’m the only family member she ever appointed as literary executor. I have the role because she believed I had the right qualifications to do it well. When the going gets tough, though, as it tends to when you guard a valuable literary estate, it helps to have had a loving relationship with the author, because that background gives me the confidence to fight for what she would have wanted. My major goal has been to try to bring the focus back onto her work in the face of pressure to exploit her personal life.

_The last two stories we ran involved characters in a psychiatric hospital, who were likely drawn from Frame’s own hospital stays. But what do you think inspired this particular story? Was there a real Gavin Highly in Frame’s life?_

There is no real anyone from Frame’s life in any of Frame’s fiction. Her characters are all invented, and that includes the narrators too. Janet Frame was frustrated by the assumption that her fiction was merely a thinly veiled documentary report on her own life. She took that suggestion as an insult, considering the amount of talent she had and the care with which she developed her craft, and the fact that she had studied the great writers before resolving to try to emulate them. Although she did draw on her own experiences, as does any author, the personal material was always filtered through her imagination and shaped to fit the genre she was working within at the time, and tailored to suit the theme she was exploring.

As a child during the Depression Frame was aware of the “swaggers” (tramps) that her mother would cook meals for as they passed by her home. It’s possible that the portrait of Gavin Highly was drawn from Frame’s observations of the way these men lived, even though Gavin Highly is not exactly homeless. We know from her autobiography that she and a friend gave the nickname “Hoppityou” to the friend’s neighbor. Gavin Highly also shouts “Hop it, you!” at naughty children, but the resemblance appears to end there. Frame distinguished between “autobiographical” fiction, in which she had the freedom to alter any detail of anything she had experienced or witnessed, and “autobiography” which was an honest attempt to describe her life and to keep to the facts within the limitations of memory.

To me this story is about the process of mythmaking, and I see quite a few signposts to that, such as “Did it happen this way?” and “that sort of story couldn’t be believed by realists” and “I did not see anything that happened but I know, I tell you, I know it happened this way.” Janet Frame was not a one-trick pony, and her revelations about the shameful and hidden aspects of psychiatric institutions were only a small part of her repertoire. One of her literary preoccupations was to explore the very springs of folklore. Perhaps it was her own experience of being misdiagnosed and falsely labelled that informed and motivated her to dig beneath the surface. She was able to tease out and sometimes satirize the way social groups make judgments and validate or exclude certain people.

_Where is the story set?_Small-town coastal New Zealand sometime after the Great Depression. There are identifiable echoes of Frame’s childhood hometown of Oamaru. She has immortalised this town by featuring it in her work. The humble house she grew up in has been restored and is now open to the public in the southern summer, and Frame fans come from all around the world to visit. It’s almost like a plot from her fiction.

_This story is somewhere between a fairy tale—in which the main character lives in a rabbit warren, takes tea with kindly ferrets, and communes with oysters—and a realistic portrayal of an impoverished man’s relationship to books. Those two elements—magic and the depressing reality of life—seem to be recurring motifs in Frame’s writing. Do you feel that this piece is a good representation of Frame’s work for those who are unfamiliar with it?_Yes, I’d call it a good introduction to her work. Several typical features of her writing appear in “Gavin Highly”. First, of course, is how well-written it is, how credible it seems, even the magical realism. Grace Cleave, the main character in Frame’s novel “Towards Another Summer,” is part migratory bird, and sprouts feathers, and yet a few commentators have insisted that Grace’s human social ineptness provides firm evidence that Frame herself must have been pathologically anti-social (which is not true by the way). Yet if we are to believe that every word in that novel is true, we would need to subject Grace’s plumage to a DNA test to discover what avian species she belongs to. Frame writes with an immediacy and an authenticity that I suppose is partly responsible for the fact that some people have mistaken her fiction for straight memoir. Her early fiction is known for this kind of vivid portrayal of the development of a child’s imaginative grasp of the world. Frame used the trendy authors of the time such as William Saroyan as her model. The kind of unreliable narrator we hear from in “Gavin Highly” is a recurring motif in her work, especially the later novels. She constantly challenges the nature of our beliefs about truth and about memory by undermining the authority of the storyteller through various narrative devices. She is known for her fables that can be as unsettling as her childhood favorite Grimm’s fairy tales. I would dispute, however, that Frame’s reality is particularly “depressing.” I don’t know of any major writer who doesn’t engage with the darker aspects of life. Frame empathized with outsiders and always considered their stories to be worth telling. She felt privileged to have gained insights into some areas of life that many people prefer to ignore, but she is speaking to the whole human condition, not just one corner of it.

_Gavin Highly is not an entirely sympathetic character. The children are somewhat afraid of him He makes violent threats to the oysters, with whom he is meant to be colluding. He is perhaps not entirely sane. And yet books are his treasure—a school history textbook is intensely valuable to him. Do you think that Frame felt a tenderness for him? Or is this a critical portrait?_I’m quite sure she intends us to have compassion for Gavin Highly. She was raised with a strong ethic of concern for the downtrodden, as she tells us in her autobiography: “Mother warned us to be careful and not to laugh at people who we thought were strange or ‘funny’ because they, too, might be angels in disguise … and even if an angel were not there, God still loved each one, no matter how poor or peculiar he might be.” We do get that Gavin Highly is peculiar, but we might be nudged by this story to wonder what treasures we have in our own lives that may not be worth what we think they are. In my opinion Frame also invites us tolerate the fickleness of the children as well as the foibles of the unreliable narrator. The meddling of the Health Inspector, not so much. It’s pretty clear the author sides with the underdog.

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